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March 11, 2016

One of the MANY great things that girl scouts do, is to complete 'fun' patches. Fun patches are just that - fun. They technically have no requirements, and you can purchase them through the council, or through a variety of websites - www.snappylogos.com is a go to for us.

When my girls do a fun patch, our troop implements some rules. This isn't for everyone, but we really like this process. We choose a patch, and then we choose 3 requirements to go with it. One requirement must be a hands on activity, one must be education based, and the third can be whatever they wish.

The patch we are talking about in this post is the card making patch. This one was NOT girl planned - we had a different activity for this meeting planned, but the little lady who helped plan the patch requirements for that night was sick. So this was my on-the-fly solution!

The three requirements I chose were:

- Learn about the history of greeting cards

- Design and make your own greeting card

- Give that card to someone special

We tied this patch into the caring and considerate petal, since my girls are daisy's. The first thing we did was talk about the history of the greeting card. This was a fairly simple chat because my girls are daisy's, but as girls age, the depth of the topic should definitely increase. First, I asked the girls if they knew what a greeting card was. They all tossed out answers - some more nonsensical that others. It boiled down to cards being a means to tell someone something. That's not far off from how they started - greeting cards were initially expensive, elaborate gifts to send messages of good will, tracing back to the ancient Egyptians, and Chinese. In the early 1400's, Europe got in on the greeting card game, and by the mid 1800's, the greeting card had been relegated to an inexpensive and favored standard of personal communication. That is also the time the greeting card was integrated into America. Until the early 1900's, the design, or art, rather than the sentiment was the focus of the card, but when today's card companies began to form and mass produce greeting cards, the sentiment became the focus. Even today, greeting cards are a popular form of communication.

The next thing we did was to create our own greeting cards. I supplied a box of materials - papers, stickers, embellishments, etc, and let the girls go to it.

The last step we did was to write a caring and considerate message on the inside, and address the envelope. The girls either mailed or hand delivered their cards to brighten someones day.

Did you do this patch? Share how it went - show me how you tweaked it!